I drove to Toronto on Friday with my family to attend a funeral. On the long, 2.5 hour drive home (average speed of 42 km/hr) we had lots of time to ask ourselves some questions. Why do we climb into cars, line up on giant highways that quickly become parking lots? Why do we do this even though, on good days, when the traffic is flowing, our risk of accidental death while driving is much higher than for any other category of activity?
There aren't any simple answers to a question like this. In our case, the simplest answer is that our only alternative (other than to not attend the funeral) would have been to take the train. The commuter train to Toronto from where we live has one scheduled departure in the morning and one scheduled return in the evening. The cheapest fares available to us (had we known that my uncle was going to die a few weeks ago so that we could have taken the early booking discount) would have cost us over $200. Even factoring in the extended cost of car travel, our journey cost us much less than half of this amount. And that is predicated on our not missing the train and so then not needing to find a place to stay for the night.
Why so few and so expensive trains? In part, because people won't use them.
Why not? In part, because with a few exceptions (Toronto itself being one of them), our rapid transit systems don't work well.
Why not? Because population densities are too low.
Why? In part, because we like our space.
People I know often make comparisons with parts of Europe, where the trains are cheap (relatively), plentiful and mostly full. Why does what works there not work here? Population density is only a part of the answer. Southern Ontario compares favourably to many areas of Europe with successful mass transit. Another part is the organization of cities: many European cities were built before the advent of cheap, widely available private transport in the form of automobiles. Also, gasoline prices in Europe are much higher than they are here.
I think that what all of this amounts to is that, all other things being equal, when we can drive, we will drive, even when the odds suggest we'll be crushed by congestion or that we'll be risking the lives of ourselves and our children. We tell ourselves that this is for the sake of efficiency, or even necessity. And sometimes it is. But it often has much to do with psychology. Cars offer us little bubbles of unassailable but highly portable personal space. We can spread our possessions out before us, talk to ourselves, fart loudly, secure in the understanding that though we might be sitting less than 3 or 4 feet from another human being, the thin sheets of glass and metal that stand between us disconnect us from them as surely as if they were on the other side of the world.
It's a curious thing that our space bubbles are so important to us that even when we're told that our overuse of them is the single biggest contributor to CO2 emissions, and even when we're offered viable transportation alternatives, we only get out of our cars when forced to do so by high cost, traffic congestion of staggering proportions, or the rule of law.
Also Europeans have toll roads. Bring on the toll roads!
Posted by: Richard Akerman | October 24, 2007 at 11:04 AM